She gave me a wide berth as she headed to her door. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I waited until the sound of her heels faded away and then I reached across the desk and grabbed the folder. The stack of documents inside it was thick, and I paged through them as fast as I could: psychological screenings (how had my sister passed those?) and interview notes (Donor expressed her honest desire to help a family in need) and ultrasound charts documenting the contents of my sister’s ovaries. I longed to read everything but instead I flipped past them all until I finally came to a photocopied document that read Recipient Consent Form across the top.
I scanned to the bottom of the page, past paragraphs of dense legalese, until I got to the signatures. The two names scrawled there were nearly illegible—Blackworth? Backwell?—but the address just beneath the signatures was written in clearly typed letters: 17344 Catalpa Way, Burbank, CA.
A yellow legal pad sat next to Camilla’s computer keyboard. I tore off a piece of paper and scribbled this address down. Then I kept flipping through the folder until I encountered another recipient consent form: 72 Buena Vista Ave, Laguna Beach, CA. Then another: 825 Joshua Tree Drive, Scottsdale, AZ.
I didn’t bother writing down the names of the people who had bought my sister’s eggs. I didn’t really want to know who they were. Why humanize the couples that had absconded with our DNA, taken advantage of my sister’s vulnerability? I just wanted to know where I should go to find the babies. I’m only going to look, to confront my loss, I rationalized, as blood dripped down my chin and left a chain of droplets across the lined yellow paper. The less I know about the families, the better.
I had just written down the third address when I heard Camilla Jackson’s heels clattering across the travertine at the end of the hallway. But three was good enough. I slammed Sam’s folder shut and slid it back across the desk, shoving the scribbled list in my purse. By the time Camilla appeared in the doorway, a cube of ice in one hand and a box of tissues in the other, I was standing up, head tilted backward, nose pinched shut with one hand.
“I feel dizzy,” I said. “I think I should go.”
She looked puzzled. “Don’t you want the information about your donations?”
“I’ll just send you my address so you can mail it.” I edged past her, toward the door. “I need to get home.”
I left her standing there, the ice melting down her wrist, a look of vague bafflement on her face. A trail of tiny blood droplets marked my way as I found the path back out to the elevator and fled.
26
A WEEK AFTER MY visit to BioCal, my mother took me out to lunch at our favorite outdoor café, where the tables are spread out under the oak trees and you can sometimes hear the children’s chorus practicing at a nearby church. I hadn’t seen her in weeks. We usually met for lunch every few weeks, plus family dinners on the first Sunday of the month, but I hadn’t had much bandwidth of late. She looked at me hungrily, as if I were an appetizer she was about to pick off a tray.
“You’ve gotten so skinny, darling,” she said and sighed, a bite of jealousy in her voice, as she ordered a bottle of Sancerre. In previous times I would have shared the bottle with her but that day I placed my hand over the glass. I’d lost my taste for alcohol. Lately, when I drank, I could sense something deep inside me starting to ferment, a panicky sourness rising from my gut. Anyway, Dr. Cindy discouraged drinking. “Alcohol is about losing your self-control,” she’d say. “And here at GenFem we’re trying to gain control.”
I was finally a Level Six, a promotion given to me after I returned from Los Angeles with the list of egg recipient addresses in my purse pocket. That night, Dr. Cindy had pulled me up onto the stage in the middle of a workshop to give me the yellow scarf that denoted my ascension up the levels. “You’ve proven your ability to transcend your comfort zone and push into new frontiers,” she said as she wrapped the strip of silk fabric around my neck, just a hair too tight. A half dozen fellow Neos applauded in the audience, their faces swollen with pride and envy. “You’re well on the path to achieving your best self.”
And yet that list still sat in a folder in a drawer in my living room, proof that I wasn’t pushing that far. I hadn’t visited the addresses on it, hadn’t even looked them up on a map. When I lay in bed alone at night, I could feel the list in the downstairs console, taunting me with its proof of my transgression. I had pretended to be my sister, I had stolen private information. I couldn’t believe I had done these things. The lightness that I had felt during the first few months of GenFem—the giddy feeling that I was discovering something essential about myself—was fading. In its place was something harder, something a little darker and more frightening.
Of course, Dr. Cindy had warned me that the growth would hurt: If it isn’t hard, then you aren’t making any progress. And yet, seven months in, I still mostly felt like I was in limbo, torn between the person that I had been and the person that GenFem told me that I ought to be, somehow managing to be neither.
My mother took a piece of focaccia from the bread basket and tore it into small pieces that she used to sop up a puddle of olive oil. The sight made me feel queasy: I didn’t have much of an appetite anymore, even when I wasn’t having a Sufferance. She popped a piece in her mouth with relish and looked at me as she chewed, her jaw slowing.
“Are you OK?” she said. “You’re not eating.”
“I’m just not hungry,” I demurred.
“You aren’t turning anorexic on me, are you?” The focaccia dangled from her greasy fingers; it looked like she was considering forcing it on me.
“No. I’m just…a little stressed.”
“Is it something to do with Sam?”
I didn’t know how to answer her question. Because of course it was about Sam, though not in any way that our mother could possibly know, since I’d never told her about Sam’s donated eggs or her attempted seduction of Chuck. (She assumed our fallout was related to all the money I’d spent on Sam’s failed rehab, and I let her believe it, since it just seemed easier.) But it was also about me, in a way that felt so much bigger; and I felt an unexpected surge of resentment toward my mother, for never looking past my sister to really see me. For always assuming that she didn’t have to worry about me.
“It’s not about Sam,” I said.
“You two made up?” She said this hopefully. A powerful smell of lavender was emanating off her, the essential oils she rubbed into her joints that didn’t seem to help her very much.
“No. And I really don’t want to talk about her.”
She seemed a little relieved by this, as if she didn’t really want to know anyway. “Of course, I understand. I just hate that you two are having issues. It seems like you should work to patch them up, don’t you think? And she does seem to be doing OK this time around. Apparently she’s stayed sober for half a year now. Maybe longer. She seems happy.”
I recalled how Sam had looked in the café the previous week, her silhouette against the coffee bar, the way she tilted her head back and laughed at something the customer had said. It didn’t seem fair that she would be happy, I thought bitterly, not when I wasn’t. And then I felt terrible for being so vindictive. I do want my sister to be happy, I reminded myself, even if I’m angry at her. And then I wondered if Dr. Cindy would approve of that sentiment, or if she’d consider it weak.
So much second-guessing. It was getting exhausting. I reached for the bread, and then withdrew my hand. Did I have a Sufferance? I couldn’t even remember anymore.